First private Mars mission aims to launch in 2018

The first people to visit Mars will get there in five years – if an audacious plan for a privately funded fly-by of the planet actually comes to fruition.

This week the Inspiration Mars Foundation, a newly formed non-profit organisation, announced plans for a mission to Mars launching on 5 January 2018 and arriving at the planet in August of that year. Dennis Tito, who in 2001 became the first space tourist to visit the International Space Station, heads the foundation. The trip will be funded primarily by philanthropic donations – but Tito has committed to personally covering the first two years of mission development, no matter how much it costs.

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“This is not a commercial mission,” Tito said at a press conference on 27 February in Washington DC. “Let me guarantee you, I will come out to be a lot poorer as a result of this mission. But my grandchildren will come out to be a lot wealthier through the inspiration that this will give them.”

Orbital trajectories shared on Twitter by team member Michael Loucks show plans for a spacecraft to leave Earth, fly past Mars and then come home – all within 501 days. The craft will pass over Mars at a distance of about 160 kilometres carrying a two-person crew, probably a married man and woman who will be paid to make the trip.

Project managers have not yet decided on the selection criteria for crew members. But the people chosen will have to have working knowledge of spacecraft systems, be comfortable in an isolated and confined environment and possess strong communications skills, says foundation spokeswoman Jessica Ballard. “We will most definitely be seeking NASA’s experience and knowledge of crew selection and training,” she said in an email to New Scientist.

They’ll need to have “the right stuff times ten”, Tito said at the press briefing.

Cosy quarters

On the way to Mars, the pair will live in an inflatable 17-cubic-metre habitat, where they will eat rehydrated food, drink recycled water and breathe recycled air. They will also be responsible for controlling and maintaining the spacecraft, including their own life-support systems. “We want to eliminate all the automation we possibly can,” said Inspiration Mars chief technology officer Taber MacCallum.

The time frame for setting up the trip is tight, but the team thinks it will be possible because the plan is based mostly on existing technology or vehicles that are in development – including rockets and crew vehicles designed by private space-flight firm SpaceX, the first commercial venture to start making regular visits to the International Space Station.

Elon Musk, SpaceX CEO, had previously promised to deliver humans to Mars within a decade or so. The company says it is not involved with Tito’s planned mission, but they will happily sell him a ride. “SpaceX is always open to providing a full spectrum of launch services to interested customers,” says spokeswoman Christina Ra. Inspiration Mars says the team is still evaluating options for spacecraft and has yet to strike a deal with a supplier.

Risky ride

Whichever craft they pick, it is not yet clear how the crew will be protected against radiation damage beyond Earth’s magnetic shielding, says Marco Durante of the Technical University of Darmstadt in Germany. “The radiation exposure is proportional to the time in space,” he says. A Mars mission would break human records for the longest continuous time spent in space (438 days) – and that was in low Earth orbit, where astronauts are fairly well protected from cosmic rays by Earth’s magnetic barrier.

The 2018 launch window coincides with a predicted solar minimum, when radiation levels from the sun should be at their lowest. But the solar wind helps deflect galactic cosmic rays – charged particles from outside the solar system that can also be damaging to humans. A less active sun means a weaker solar wind, and so more cosmic radiation in deep space. Overall, we don’t know enough about the risk in space to tell whether current radiation shields can guarantee the astronauts’ safety, says Durante.

Chief medical officer Jonathan Clark, who oversaw supersonic skydiver Felix Baumgartner’s jump from the stratosphere, says the crew will almost certainly be exposed to enough radiation to put them at a 3 per cent increased risk of cancer. That’s the exposure limit NASA places for astronauts to accumulate over their entire careers. He says this is a concern but not a show-stopper, in part because the team will use an unprecedented personalised medicine approach to tailor the life-support programme to the individual astronauts.

More worrisome is a sudden event like a solar flare that could expose them to a lot of radiation all at once or that could damage onboard computers and spur an in-flight emergency. “If you get back and you have cancer, we can deal with that on Earth,” Clark said. “Our focus is minimising the effects of acute radiation on crew performance.”

Even if the first 490 days go off without a hitch, the most dangerous part of the mission will be yet to come. The spacecraft will be going so fast when it returns to Earth that it will have to spend 10 days in our planet’s orbit to lose speed. After that, it will still be travelling at a record 14 kilometres per second when it enters the atmosphere, according to a feasibility study conducted by Tito and his team.

Still, the foundation members are adamant that the plan could work, and that it is a valuable undertaking&colon; “Life is risky,” Clark said. “Anything that’s worth it is worth putting it all at stake for.”